Friends,
We’re about to enter the holiest days of the Jewish year – and they are never easy.
It’s the time we as a people are called to the work of repentance: Confession. Regret. Change.
As a child in synagogue, the language of “judgment” and being “sealed in the Book of Life” filled me with awe. As an adult, I’ve come to recognize the unique opportunity these days provide for introspection.
To measure ourselves against our values. Confess where we have strayed. To turn back toward what is just and right.
Confronting hard questions isn’t supposed to be easy. How have I failed? How has my community failed? Where have we hardened our hearts? Where have we looked away?
We engage with the burden of our sins and – metaphorically – we cast them away as breadcrumbs onto moving water in a New Year’s afternoon ritual.
This year, none of us can step into synagogue without carrying the unbearable weight of Gaza. The horror, bloodshed and suffering – from the hostages still captive to the two million people living, starving and dying amid the rubble.
Rabbis across the country are wrestling with what to say. Some hear the plea not to “bring politics” into sacred space. Others feel the unshakable moral demand to speak out against the horrors unfolding before us.
This is a test: For rabbis, leaders and all of us.
Do we choose safety, convenience or approval – or do we speak the truth as we understand it, even at personal cost? Will we water down our message to avoid offense, or will we summon the moral clarity this moment demands?
I have said for many months: Silence in the face of this level of human suffering and ethical transgression is not neutrality – it is complicity.
Jewish voices across the spectrum are calling us to honesty and courage.
Former Jewish Theological Seminary Chancellor Ismar Schorsch has asked: “Where is the religious voice today, so that long after today we can still proudly be Jews?”
This summer, 80 Orthodox rabbis reminded us that Israel’s future depends not only on military strength but on “justice, righteousness, and peace for all people – even and especially in the hardest of times.”
In his recent book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, Peter Beinart warns that unchecked ethnonationalism will corrode the very soul of Judaism.
The liturgy of the days ahead itself gives us no escape.
In the Vidui – the communal confession – we name sins both ours and not ours, personal and collective, individual and systemic. We strike our hearts for transgressions we may not have committed, but on whose account we still bear responsibility.
We cannot say: This is not my doing, I am innocent.
We reflect, we confess, we ask forgiveness – not to wallow in guilt, but to take responsibility and begin again. That’s the essence of the High Holy Days.
We ask: Could I have done more? Should I have done more? That, too, is part of our reckoning in the days ahead.
This is not about despair. It is about honesty. It is about remembering that to save one life is to save an entire world, and to destroy one life is to destroy a world.
And today, when worlds are being destroyed daily, the question for each of us is urgent: What is within my power to save, to change, to repair?
My hope is that our leaders – in pulpits, boardrooms, congressional offices and communal institutions – will reckon with their responsibility, and call us all to do the same.
May we not only confess, but commit to the prophetic call at the heart of Judaism: To pursue justice, protect life and honor the image of God in every human being.
Shanah tovah to all who celebrate,
Jeremy Ben-Ami
President, J Street
